Greetings all:

I have need to write to 8 liteon 52x cdr drives simultaneously. My original plan was to connect them to a pair of promise ultra 100 tx2 cards. This worked out very poorly, as CPU usage was 100% and write speed was very slow. My software is CdMate.

I then disconnected all but one of the cdr drives and the performance was nearly the same. I concluded that the promise ultra100 tx2 was not a good cdr controller for my system. Looking through the information on their website confirmed that this card was not suitable for my application using WinXp.

Next, I connected the hard drives to one of the controller cards and 4 of the cdr's to the on board ide ports. This worked wonderfully. All 4 cdr's spun up to full speed and wrote simultaneously, with no more than 15% CPU usage.

My questions are: What controller card might better suit this application in my current system. 

My understanding is that the promise card would work for me using windows 98. I am considering adding a second motherboard and associated hardware to run the copier as a separate system. If I go this route, I am thinking along the line of a non-extravagant motherboard, cpu, ram, etc, as so little of my current system resources are now required. Can anyone tell me what properties in a system are needed to efficiently write from hard drive to CD. Possibly I could cannibalize an older system.

My current system is: P4s8x, [log in to unmask], 1G ram, 2ea 80G WD, 1ea 40G WD, 19"rack mount case. The second case with CD drives and additional PS is similar and can either mount on top of the first with interconnecting IDE cables passing through, or stand alone with it's own MB. Either way, space is not really an issue.

 Oh yes, no copyright violations intended! This is a church related project and all copied material will be original.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Respectfully,
Jeff - K1LE - CT ><>

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